The Digital Native Trap: How Digital Technologies Imprint Social Enterprise Scaling

This paper examines the conditions under which novel technologies enable scaling in social enterprises, which we understand as growth in mission-oriented activities. Building on imprinting theory, we argue that digitalization—the adoption and use of digital technologies—holds transformative potential for scaling, but its outcomes are contingent on the prevailing technology at the time of an organization's founding. Our contextual view of digitalization proposes that the effect of digitalization on scaling depends on whether organizations are digital natives, founded in the digital age and imprinted with digital technologies from inception, or technological incumbents, founded before digital technologies became widespread and later adapting to them. Using a unique dataset of administrative and survey data tracking social enterprises in the San Francisco Bay Area in the period between the Great Recession and COVID-19, we analyze the association between digitalization and scaling trajectories over a decade. Our findings show that digitalization is generally associated with an increase in scaling; however, digital natives do not benefit from digitalization to the same extent as technological incumbents—a counterintuitive result we term the digital native trap. We explain this effect as an early overreliance on the affordances of digital technologies, which may eclipse the need to develop the affordances necessary to overcome liabilities of newness. Bridging literatures on imprinting, digitalization, and scaling, we contribute to social entrepreneurship and organizational research by revealing the heterogeneous effects of digitalization and by showing how technological imprinting shapes organizations' ability to leverage digital technologies for social impact.